Medicament delivery devices for self-administration have been on the market for a number of years. In order for the devices to be handled by non-professionals, they have to be easy to use and intuitive. Further, since many of the drugs are vital or at least very important to the patient there is a desire from physicians and other professionals to obtain information that the patients medicate according to prescribed schemes. The desired information could include the type of drug, delivery times and dates, dose size. Additional information that could be beneficial to the physician is that the drug has being taken using the correct procedure according to instructions for use; that the drug has the prescribed temperature during drug delivery; that the right injection depth has been used and that the correct injection speed has been used, when the medicament delivery device is an injector.
In order to obtain this information from the medicament delivery device, a number of solutions have been presented. Document WO 2004/084116 discloses a system for presenting and distributing medication information. According to the document, a medicament delivery device is arranged with communication mechanisms which will enable communication with a terminal device such as a cellular or a mobile phone or a PDA. A preferred communication standard is Bluetooth. The medicament delivery device is arranged with a number of sensors for monitoring and registering e.g. a dose delivery sequence. The idea is then to use the functionality of the terminal device, such as its display, its processor, its keyboard, etc. instead of providing the medicament delivery device with such features. The transfer of the functionality to the terminal device will reduce the cost of the medicament delivery device in comparison with medicament delivery devices provided with such functionality.
However, a drawback with the solution according to WO 2004/084116 is that a Bluetooth circuit, or the like wireless communication systems such as ANT or ZigBee, is built into the housing of the medicament delivery device. The communication system with its battery to power the circuit requires a certain space in a medicament delivery device. It is thus not so easy to modify existing designs or to easily provide existing designs with added functionality that communication systems can provide.
Other communication technologies that might be interesting are for instance radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. If passive RFID-tags are used, then no battery is required and the tags can be made very small. One favourable solution is to produce the tags as labels or stickers that can be attached to surfaces of a device. In the technical area of medicament delivery devices, RFID has been used to some extent for identifying certain components comprised in the medicament delivery device, completed operation sequence or for collecting information regarding adherence of a medicament delivery scheme.
Regarding identification, document U.S. Pat. No. 8,355,753 discloses a medication site arranged with a medication port to which a medicament container may be releasably attached. The neck portion of the medicament container is in one embodiment arranged with an RFID-tag with an antenna that can be connected or disconnected by a switch. When the medicament container is connected to the medication port, the switch connects the antenna and the information on the RFID-tag can be read by an RFID-reader in the medication site. The information contained in the RFID-tag may be the type of drug contained. According to another embodiment in U.S. Pat. No. 8,355,753, an RFID-tag may be arranged to be activated when medication has been delivered, thus sending information to the medication site that the delivery sequence is completed.
The drawback with the medication site according to U.S. Pat. No. 8,355,753 is that the device as such is rather complex and expensive, comprising a number of features and functions that are not a part of self-administering medicament delivery devices and certainly not for disposable medicament delivery devices.